The Match Factory Girl (1990)

Aki Kaurismäki's films consist mostly of silences (he has also made a silent film). For the first 20 minutes of The Match Factory Girl, we hear no spoken words, but other sounds unravel the life-world of Iiris, a young girl who lives with her parents. We hear the rumbling sounds in the factory she works in. Snippets of news are presented (it's 1989 and the world is in turmoil). The first word we hear by a character, in this case Iiris, is, if I remember correctly, "a beer". These drawn-out silences are heavy with sadness, but Kaurismäki is also evoking proletarian gloom from a humorous point of view.

OK, so the story here is flooding with dead-pan humour and tongue-in-cheek miserabilism. Iiris has a lousy job. Iiris' parents are oppressive. When Iiris meets a man, he tells her, after one night together, that he has no intentions whatsoever of initiating a relationship. But Iiris is pregnant. He is not interested in having a child. An appointment at the doctor's. Iiris rests in a hospital bed. Her dad enters the room, utters a sentence of dour and insulting words, and equally dismissively, places an apple on the table next to her bed.

It's easy to describe the film: it's a blunt, dark, humorous fairytale. All scenes are extremely austere, in terms of dialogue, camera angle, composition - even set design.  One person at an internet discussion board called this film "a Finnish Jeanne Dielman". To me, that is a very apt, yet quite surprising comparison. Akerman's and Kaurismäki's vision of urban drabness have many similarities, and their sense for meticiously composing every frame can be seen as related as well. Or maybe because these two belong among my favorite movies. Unlike Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, diegetic music plays a big role in Kaurismäki's work. There is tango, rock n roll schmaltz. The scene in which Iiris, whose parents threw her out, sits in her brother's bachelor's pad, gazing at a pool table and listening to the jukebox (!) is simply heartbreaking. And FYI: The world can't have enough of Olavi Virta.